Make Your Own Bonemeal

Found this great note on Facebook. It was interesting to me because I’ve got this goal to use every part of a chicken or turkey with nothing thrown away. Bonemeal is an excellent garden amendment and can be used as an ingredient in homemade dog food or as a calcium supplement for dogs.

Making Bonemeal For Your Garden

Making bonemeal for your garden helps control the quality of the bone meal, making it from the anti-biotic and hormone free bones from your dinner. This can be done with any type of bones.

To do this, place the bones into a cooking pot and cover them with water. Add a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar per quart of water. Bring this to a boil until cooked down to the last bits of water, then simmer that off too. This all breaks down the constituents of bone and makes them soft enough to break. Now, place the bones into a baking dish and bake in the oven on low heat until they are dry and brittle. Cool, put into a plastic bag, wrap that in a dish towel, put that into another plastic bag. Either hit this bag against some cement or a rock, or just take a hammer to the bag. This can be stored in a can for use when needed.

Mix the bone meal into the soil around your herbs or into the soil before planting. It’s a good source of phosphorus, which helps with root system growth, for better flower, fruit and seed development, and vitamin content. Also a source of nitrogen, which is a general herb growth promoter and helps the herbs ability to make proteins. Nitrogen tends to give strength and vigor to sickly, spindly herbs.

Thanks, Missy. I’ve read a lot about people feeding bone meal to their chickens to give them calcium for laying eggs. I probably should feed some to mine. I’m using a Layena now, so they should be getting enough except I’ve noticed they have weak shells coming out of moult. You just have to boil them to get the membrane off so they don’t get a taste for eggs.

The price of Layena has gone up 36% in the two years I’ve had the chickens. I am looking into more ways to produce my own food for them so it is something I will be looking into more.

Holly, that is an excellent question. I think that many of the minerals would still be intact like phosphorus and calcium since they make up the structure of the bones. There is still bone there, so there must still be some of those minerals. There is still marrow in the bones, too, but that would probably have the most nutrients removed. I think it would still have a benefit for the animals and the garden.